Truffle and Graal: Fast Programming Languages With Modest Effort

Not all programming languages can be supported by huge expert engineering teams to make them as fast as major languages such as Java and JavaScript. Two technologies from Oracle Labs are making it easy to achieve similar results with much less work. Truffle is a framework for writing language interpreters on top of the JVM, and Graal is a new JVM dynamic compiler that makes them fast with very modest effort.

We’ll use Ruby to give a concrete example of how we have taken a large existing language with much accidental and historical complexity and with a modest team and time have given it performance to rival Java and JavaScript.